Part 4 (1/2)
The Judge glanced up at me, slipping his paper knife end over end through his fingers.
”I have spoken of myself as nonplussed,” he said more seriously, ”and I am. I was never more so; but I see no occasion for anxiety. Since when has it been thought necessary to call priest or physician because of a young lady's growing charm? Confronted by an ugly duckling, we must congratulate the swan.”
”Judge, how much money does one need to marry on in New York?”
”All that a man has; all that he can get; often more. But--ah--is the question imminent? Nelly is in school; you have come out of the West, as I understand it, to attack New York. Conquer it, Sir; conquer New York before you speak of marriage to a New York woman.”
”Helen is not a New York woman.”
”We naturalize them at the docks and stations.”
”But you--” I repressed a movement of impatience. ”Didn't you marry young?”
”Mrs. Baker and I began our married life in one room; cooked over the gas jet, in tin pails. And if little Nelly is the equal of other women of her family--but that is practice versus principle, my young friend; practice versus principle.”
He turned again to his letters, and I understood that the interview was closed.
Right after lunch I started for Barnard. Helen has written so much about the college that as soon as I struck the Boulevard I knew the solid brick building with its tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs of stone fasces. I turned into the cloistered court on One Hundred and Nineteenth Street and paused a minute, looking up at its Ionic porticoes and high window lettered ”Millbank Hall.”
Then I entered, and a page, small, meek and blue-uniformed, trotted ahead of me through a beautiful hall, white with marble columns and mosaics, sumptuous with golden ceiling, dazzling with light and green with palms, to the curtained entrance of a dainty reception room.
”Stop a minute, Mercury,” I said as he turned to leave; ”where is Miss Wins.h.i.+p?”
He reappeared from an office beyond, replying:--
”Biol'gy lab'r'tory. What name?”
Instead of waiting until Nelly could be summoned, I followed the mildly disapproving boy up a great, white stairway, past groups of girls, some in bright silk waists and some in college gowns. Even in the farthest corner remote from the hubbub, a musical echo blent of gay talk and laughter filled the air; a light body of sound that the walls held and gave out as a continuous murmur.
A second time piping, ”What name, Sir?” Mercury opened the door of a large room with many windows. At the far corner my eyes sought out Helen in conversation with a keen-eyed, weazened little man, at sight of whom the boy took to his heels.
Three women besides Helen were in the room, bunched at a table that ran along two sides under the windows. They wore big checked ap.r.o.ns, and one of them squinted into her microscope under a fur cap. Wide-mouthed jars, empty or holding dirty water, stood on other tables ranged up and down the middle of the room, and there was a litter of porcelain-lined trays, test tubes, pipettes, gla.s.s stirring-rods and racks for microscope slides.
Against the wall to the left were cabinets with sliding doors, showing retorts, apparatus, bottles of drugs, jars of specimens and large, coloured models of flowers and of the lower marine forms. Against the right hand wall were sinks, an incubator and, beyond, a door leading into a drug closet. There was the usual laboratory smell, in which the penetrating fume of alcohol, the smokiness of creosote and carbolic acid, the pungency of oil of clove and the aroma of Canada balsam struggled for the mastery.
In her college gown Helen looked more like herself than the day before and less so, the familiar dress accentuating every difference. Against the flowing black her loveliness shone fair and delicate as a cameo, I thought of the Princess Ida,
Liker to the inhabitant Of some far planet close upon the sun Than our man's earth; such eyes were in her head, And so much grace and power-- Lived through her to the tips of her long hands And to her feet.
She had not noticed my entrance, but as I stepped forward, she turned, and I was again lost in wonder at her marvellous grace. Her beauty seemed a harmony so vitally perfect that the sight of it was a joy approaching pain.
I had not been mistaken! She was the rarest thing in human form on this earth. I was awed and frightened anew at her perfection.
”Why, how did you find your way out here?” she asked with girlish directness. ”I'm not quite ready to go; I must finish my sections for Prof. Darmstetter.”
The Professor--I had guessed his ident.i.ty--joined us, glancing at me inquisitively. His spare figure seemed restless as a squirrel's, but around the pupils of his eyes appeared the faint, white rim of age.
”You are friendt of Mees Veensheep?” he asked. ”Looks she not vell? New York has agreed vit' her; not so?”
At my awkward, guarded a.s.sent, I thought that something of the same surprise Judge Baker had voiced at my moderation flitted over the old man's face.